Adrian is home from school because of a runny nose, but essentially not the least bit sick. So when the sun is shining bright, we can go for a walk in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

Mello is Melodifestivalen, a Swedish song competition where the winner gets to represent Sweden in the Eurovision song contest. Ingrid used to be a fan but has outgrown it, while Adrian still cares.

I wouldn’t say I hate it, and in these pandemic times I can’t even say I have better thing to do with my Saturday evenings, but I don’t much enjoy it either. But Adrian really wants company – watching TV on his own is just no fun – so I sit there and knit and follow the competition just enough so I can converse with him.

Today was the finals, which Adrian celebrated a Mello-pink donut. (The previous, less important shows only merited pink Mello smoothies and sometimes just fruit snacks.)

Adrian’s favourite breakfast is a cherry tomato omelette. I make one for him and me almost every weekend. Eric is not that fond of eggs for breakfast, and Ingrid we rarely even see before 11 on weekends, so it’s just Adrian and me.

I’ve never quite gotten the hang of proper French omelettes, which you are supposed to keep stirring all the time. When I do that, I end up with scrambled eggs… which we also love, but not when we want an omelette. The fact that our omelettes are made of at least 5 eggs probably doesn’t help. My omelettes are more like the Spanish and Italian ones: thick fluffy ones, filled with stuff, slowly cooked under a lid. But with tomatoes instead of potatoes.

Cherry tomatoes are on the “must always have at home” list only because of these omelettes.

Two of Adrian’s favourite foods are dumplings and spring rolls. He loves Asian buffets – not for the wide variety of food but for the chance to stuff himself with dumplings.

He’s been asking for a while now if we could make dumplings at home. I’m not very interested in meals that are more crafts than cooking. For the same reason I’m not very interested in making sushi, although I like eating it.

Eric was willing to give it a go, though. The whole project took hours. First, making the dough and the filling. And then all this rolling and filling and shaping… Adrian liked the first steps, but the assembly part was too tedious for his taste, so I had to step in and help out to get them done in time for dinner. It was pretty tedious; I can understand that he didn’t enjoy it much.

The result tasted good. But store-bought frozen dumplings are also good, and I’m really not sure if these tasted two hours better.

Adrian loved them though, and immediately started talking about making them again. If we ever do, we need to find a faster way of filling and shaping them.

Minecraft is perhaps not the most exciting game, but it’s one that both Ingrid and Adrian keep returning to. In reality it’s a social platform more than a game. It’s not the gameplay that attracts them. The game is just something to do while they talk to their friends. Like in previous generations people would meet over a game of bridge, or pool. But corona-friendly.

Adrian and Eric made swirl buns of various kinds: cinnamon, poppy seed, chocolate and orange peel. I like buns and all kinds of other cakes but the desire to eat them rarely grows strong enough to make me bake. I don’t even know why. It’s not that I dislike baking, or find it difficult. I just… don’t do it. How nice it is to have family that does.

I wonder what it is that makes us not want to go to bed at night, when sleeping is actually a rather pleasant and comfortable activity.

I stay up too late way too often – reading, mostly – and when I finally go to bed I wonder why I didn’t do it earlier.

Adrian does the same. He knows he needs to shower but he puts it off, and then he wants a last late snack, and then he stays up reading Kalle Anka some more, and by the time he finally gets to bed it’s later than he wanted it to be.

A beautiful, snowy walk on Järvafältet around Säby.

We saw quite extensive ski tracks on the fields. I didn’t know there were prepared tracks here. Tempting. I wonder if my back country skis would fit in the tracks.

Several of the games that Adrian plays have a mechanism where you can collect things that don’t matter much for the main game play. In Animal Crossing there are collections of bugs and fish and fossils. In both Zelda BOTW and Pokemon Sword, there are (among other things) recipes to collect to fill your recipe books. Inspired by an apple curry in Pokemon Sword, Adrian wanted us to make one in real life. I would never have thought to make an apple curry, but it turned out quite nice. Adrian even decorated his portion to match the picture in the game.

Adrian decided that he wanted to learn programming in a real language, not just dragging and dropping coloured blocks in Scratch. He’s figuring out his first steps in Python, making text appear on the screen.